LIMITS

By Clay Stafford

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I was raised to believe that when I came to an obstacle, it was a personal shortcoming if I did not push through, a personal failure if I did not succeed, and a personal cowardice if I gave up. Those beliefs inhabited the marrow of my bones and festered in the recesses of my brain. I had no natural limits, none of us did, or so I thought and was bred to believe. Even giving credence to such an absurd suggestion felt irresponsible. I knew I and everyone else could overcome anything if we only pushed hard enough. There was no skill we couldn’t learn, no talent we couldn’t expand, no mountain we could not climb. I not only judged myself; I judged everyone. I taught it to my students and in my lectures. We all needed to be responsible for the optimal performance of our lives. It was called being dependable, being responsible, rising to the challenge, working harder and smarter, and pushing through. The push was always highly emotional, causing stress and conflict not only in me but in all my relationships, where others’ performances fell short, but I knew it was worth it. It brought out the best in all of us. Like a winning coach, I pushed myself and those around me. And when they pushed back, I viewed their lack of participation as denial and even laziness. Emotionally wrought, I could never see the mental clarity lost in this thinking. From the dejected faces of those I lived and worked with, it seemed I failed in the very presence that I thought I was being, the one I thought I was protecting. Even in that, I strove to do better.

The satisfaction of control brought me peace, or so I thought. I put myself in charge of my destiny. I oversaw my own future, and nothing could get in the way of that, and very little did. I offered every problem and relationship a doorway that could make things easier for me and everyone around me, but if it was blocked, I had no qualms about going through the wall. Pushing longer, harder, and stronger was, to me, a form of commitment. Staying with a problem until the end of the day, even if that day ran into the night, or even several days without sleep, was applaudable devotion and intention. Accepting limits or growing tired meant one had no self-respect. This was how a meaningful life was to be built; the lives of the great men and women I read in biographies exemplified that. They pushed through because they had something all of us could acquire: character. They built meaningful lives; I would, too. Endurance, discipline, and refusal to quit were the framework of success. Refusal to quit meant refusal to retreat, like cowards, like those who were weak. Even rest itself, I told myself, could wait. “I can sleep when I’m dead” was not uncommon coming out of my mouth in reply to those who were close to me and cared, as I popped my trucker’s caffeine pills, drank my ten Cuban coffees, and my gallon of daily tea.

The cost of this thinking and living with such force didn’t show up immediately. It took decades. That’s the deception we take to heart when we believe the deceitfulness chocked at us by the sycophants of the famous. The famous lied to the watching world, the obsequious flatterers lied to readers of books about great men and women, and then I took those as truths and lied to myself. Sure, the lies gave me extra waking time, or something that resembled it anyway. I learned how to stretch the day thinner, how to draw more from myself than I thought I could. The point that activity didn’t always equal accomplishment, though, was often lost on me. What I gained in hours, I lost, though I didn’t realize it, in life and relational clarity. After decades of this rat race, my attention to the important things, not just the walls to burst through, began to dull. My decisions about where to focus slowed. Simple things began to take longer, though I attributed that to age. Regardless, the very life I had always believed I was protecting by defining my own fate began to resist me.

I began to see, or rather I began to feel, that the very wall that I could not seem to push through was myself. Nothing dramatic happened to show me this. Fatigue didn’t announce itself to me publicly. Nothing in my life collapsed. Feeling tired all the time wasn’t bad; it was my baseline. Yet, focus began to take on the persona of irritation toward my work, myself, and the people around me. I no longer set out to tackle only the big things; small problems now carried more weight than they should have, and small mistakes by others began to irritate me. Life began to feel painful, even at times undesirable. Everything became such a big deal. I found that where I used to slam through walls, I began to make choices not out of intention, but out of relief. I became drawn to whatever would end the discomfort the fastest.

Being successful, I began to wonder, why did I feel at rock bottom? Being high in my profession, having relationships others would envy, having built the life I envisioned, something had to change, though I didn’t know how to give it a name. My choices began to become ill-guided, not from indifference, but from dullness. The part of me that once noticed nuance grew silent. Subtle distinctions in life, work, and people disappeared. I lost my sense of when effort was required and when time was the truer answer. I could still function, but I was compensating, now relying totally on force on everything where attention and inspiration once worked cleanly.

Then came denial, and the emotional cost that followed. Each time I overrode the yokes, big and small, that pulled me down, I taught myself not to listen. Signals that I used to welcome began to annoy me. They were inconveniences to my peace. Discomfort became something to suppress, to submit to silently rather than with understanding. Gradually, all trust eroded, not just in my body, mind, emotions, or energy, but in myself in general. A faint impatience began to settle in, yet flat, a sense that I was now pushing through life, all parts of it, still accomplishing, but rather than moving with it, things were no longer flowing.

As a result of shutting out the world and the world within my own head, my world narrowed. Limits began to change perspective. Everything became about getting through the day. Curiosity, my lifeblood, even began to fade. I knew something needed to be done, but that was the problem. I had everything I could ever want. Recovery from that seemed crazy and certainly ungratefully indulgent. Surprise began to have no place or excitement. My world was perfect. I was not in crisis, yet I was living as though I were. Survival mode replaced presence without my consent. Everyone around me felt it or felt the brunt of what I would not share.

I think the most dangerous part was how ordinary it all felt. Nothing told me to stop. Nothing told me to slow down. Nothing hinted at any type of collapse. Nothing told me I needed to stop bashing walls. No one told me I had a problem, or if they did, I didn’t hear. What I was doing, though, was operating below capacity, and I’d been doing it for way too long. I focused on my limitations to the point of obsession, at the expense of seriousness and gratitude about what I could control. There were limitations that I could not power through, I realized after too many years. And because I didn’t realize this earlier, all limitations, even challenges, began to operate out of the same intensity. Out of the blue, it hit me that if I couldn’t power through certain things that didn’t erase who I was or what I could become despite them. I realized that maybe those walls were there for a reason, that maybe I was meant to be something I didn’t consciously see myself as. The realization was slow and painful, but my life began to change. Centering took the place of warfare.

My limits took on a new light. They were never obstacles; they were misconceptions on my part. They were even guardians of who I was meant to be. The sad thing is, I had been deluded and deluded myself for a lifetime. I recognized the pundits of the super life were frauds. I began to respect those limits. At first, I didn’t respect limits dramatically or perfectly, but rather honestly, and, when I did, something softened inside me like the Grinch’s frozen heart. Efforts on things that were within my limits became cleaner. Decisions within my framework grew quieter and more precise. Life began to deepen again, rather than merely expanding. I began to do less because I stopped slamming into walls and instead spent my time doing more. That was the paradox. In fact, I did better at everything I did. The cost of refusing to stop at natural limitations had been the gradual loss of the very capacities that made my efforts meaningful in the first place. Limits and walls became not challenges to defeat, but invitations to stop long enough to acknowledge, honor, and preserve those things that did matter within the sphere of life I’d been given in which to live. Limits became no more than a beautiful river in my life, a life without a boat, that asked me to choose the path to the left or to the right when it told me in so many ways I could not cross but promised adventure no matter which direction I chose.

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Creating Your Personal and Business Road Map to Success as an Author! – Wrapping Up the Lessons Learned

By Pamela Ebel

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The time has come to talk of many things we’ve covered in the first three articles in this series and wrap them up with string and sealing-wax. 

In Article One, we determined that writing and publishing is a business. Because successful businesses have a concrete list of goals to be achieved, we outlined the skills needed to reach them. The list included 1) learning to avoid the ‘one right answer’ when outlining our career goals, 2) learning to create a structure to keep us on track to achieve those goals, 3) developing ‘situational awareness’ to respond to the impact that time and events have on those goals, and 4) Answering  Five Questions that will help us move forward on the path to writing success. 

Closing out our journey, we’re reminded that lives and career paths are not linear and therefore goals will run into head winds, be impacted by situations that slow us down or stop us completely for a time. Such is life, and if we’re confronted by the need to answer why the sea is boiling hot or whether pigs have wings, the answers to the following questions will help get us get back on the path.

The Five Questions to Answer

1. Who is our target readership?
   Is it large enough to provide a livable income for our personal and business needs? While this seems to go without saying, the impact of events in this day and age make asking and answering this question crucial. Traditional Publishing houses are consuming each other at voracious rates. Small and Independent Publishers are feeling the stresses of a reading public that seems to shift reading habits and preferences rapidly. Self-published authors who found ways to swiftly reach their intended readers are also beginning to feel the head winds as technologies change and readers see more ‘look-alikes’ available in their preferred genres.
   
   This means many readers no longer feel tied to ‘recognized author loyalties.’ It’s like reading tea leaves, yet failure to search the bottom of our cups may lead to a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and failure.

2. What value does our writing provide the readers?
   Once we decide on the genre(s) and publication platform(s) we plan to use to reach readers, it will be time to determine what our works offer the readers that is different from similar writings. Writers have created virtual worlds to communicate with the readers in ways that feel as though they are ‘personal friends.’ We need to assess the brand we create, study the market place to look for trends that are working, and search for inspiration to create new approaches to support our work. 

3. What is our business model?
   Are we writing in the traditional world with an agent that makes the contacts for us; an editor that is assessing our work and keeping us on ‘deadlines’ and a legal team assessing contracts, copyright issues and other artistic rights? Or are we working with a small press, independent press, university press, or a hybrid of some sort, that don’t always have access to those resources? Or are we creating a self-publishing career where we wear all of the above hats? These models will different revenue streams, pricing strategies, and time and work flow management supports. We need to decide what we can handle and what we need to seek help for.

4. How are we working to build a sustainable business?
   We need to go back to that list of goals we created when we decided to turn writing into a career and tweak them with solutions that answer these questions: What are our strategies for attracting new readers and keeping those who have invested in our writing so far?   Networking strategies? Communication mechanisms, online and in-person? Calendaring and committing to attendance at conferences? Author/reader gatherings? Appearances at Public Events in the communities we live in? We need to remember all of these impact our family and other work obligations.

5. How do we manage the skills sets needed to operate our business?
   There are numerous operational questions that will arise when we begin to write full time. Chief among the early questions are, which computer, printer, and writing programs will fit our needs?                   

It’s at this point we need to look into the various publishing platforms we hope to submit to and publish with. Many online and traditional publishers no longer accept PDF submissions. So, we need to decide if purchasing this program and the supporting program, Acrobat, are necessary. Everyone will have to decide if a Mac of PC is the best set up for them. Depending on whether we plan to work with an agent and traditional publisher, a small press, a hybrid or go the self-publishing route we’ll have to contend with contracts for editing services, formatting services, publication clauses. and the financial decisions that arise. We should consider the possible need for tax professionals and intellectual property attorneys who can assist in avoiding tax and legal pitfalls. Finally, we’ll need to decide whether we should acquire professionals to assist in publicity development.                                                                                                                                    

Looking at the issues above, we’re reminded WRITING IS A BUSINESS! And what we don’t know or choose not to consider can cost us. If we’re willing to take the time to consider the points raised in this series and frame answers that best suit our individual  needs, we can Create Personal and Business Road Maps to Success as Writers.

Good luck to us all!